data-scientist
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Aparna Divaraniya Turned a Two-Day Science Sprint Into an Eight-Year Company
The scientist who avoided business classes built Oova by treating entrepreneurship like research: assemble the right people, measure what matters, and let the evidence sharpen the idea.
Tim Cherkasov
Tim Cherkasov is the co-founder and CEO of Trace (YC S25), an AI-native workflow orchestration platform that routes tasks between human teams and AI agents. A serial founder since age 17 with a fintech and data science background, he built and shut down the crypto-portfolio startup Clustr before pivoting into Trace, which topped the YC Launchpad leaderboard for the Summer 2025 cohort and raised a $3M seed round in early 2026.
Austin Trombley
Austin Trombley is the founder and CEO of Satschel, Inc., the Whitefish, Montana parent company behind Liquidity.io (a regulated tokenized trading platform), Simplici (KYC/AML onboarding and compliance), and ARQ Securities. A software engineer turned fintech executive, he co-founded the machine-learning hedge fund Random Forest Capital, which Franklin Templeton acquired roughly 15 months in, then served as VP of Blockchain & AI at Franklin Templeton and EVP at the payments company SpotOn before building Satschel's stack for bringing private credit and private equity onto public blockchains.
Eric Tsai
Eric Tsai is the co-founder and CEO of Asteroom, a proptech company that turns an ordinary smartphone into a professional 3D virtual tour studio. A former Facebook data scientist, he left big tech in 2019 to chase a stubborn problem in real estate: high-quality property visualization was too expensive and too complicated for the average agent. Under his lead, Asteroom grew to serve tens of thousands of agents and built a nationwide network of certified data collectors, becoming the first 3D tour platform to power property data collection for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR and Fannie Mae's value-acceptance programs.
Saif Bhatti
Saif Bhatti is the founder and CEO of Renoster, an Austin-based carbon credit ratings agency that uses remote sensing and open science to grade nature-based carbon projects on whether they actually remove carbon. He started the company in 2019 as anti-poaching technology - a device that listens for gunshots on the African savanna to protect rhinos - and pivoted it into one of the sharpest, most independent watchdogs in the voluntary carbon market. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer and philosopher turned data scientist, he has helped review hundreds of millions of credits and published deep-transparency reports that have rattled some of the world's largest carbon projects.
Samuel Smith
Samuel 'Sam' Smith is the CEO of Gather, the spatial virtual-office platform for distributed teams. He joined in mid-2022 as a data scientist after falling for the product on an office visit, rose to Head of Data and Business Analytics, and was named CEO in April 2026 when founders Phillip Wang, Mohammed Kumail Jaffer and Jinen Kamdar handed over the reins. A Denver-based data person turned chief executive, he is steering an independent, non-venture-backed Gather back to its roots: spontaneous conversations, customizable rooms, pets, and the small delightful details that make remote work feel less remote.
Alex Sambvani
Alex Sambvani is the co-founder and CEO of Slang.ai, a New York voice-AI company that answers the phone for restaurants so staff don't have to. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with a Harvard MBA, he met co-founder Gabriel Duncan on Spotify's data science team, where the two won a company-wide hackathon with a personality-forward voice app. He turned a childhood love of cooking and robotics into a company that has handled more than 25 million guest calls for over 2,000 restaurant locations. Slang.ai has raised roughly $68 million across its rounds, including a $36 million Series B, with backers ranging from Homebrew and Underscore VC to chef Tom Colicchio.
Luke Arrigoni
Luke Arrigoni is the founder and CEO of Loti, a Seattle startup that hunts the internet for deepfakes, impersonators, and unauthorized images of its users and gets them taken down - usually within 17 hours. A mathematics graduate turned data scientist, he spent over a decade running the AI consultancy Arricor for clients like Getty Images and AT&T before co-founding Loti in 2022 with his wife Rebekah Arrigoni. The company scans roughly 100 million images and videos a day, has captured a large share of the A-list celebrity market, raised a $16.2M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, and now offers free likeness protection to everyday people.
Severence MacLaughlin
Severence MacLaughlin is the founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, a Palm Beach-based company building predictive AI products for healthcare and sales. A Cornell-trained scientist with a PhD from the University of Adelaide, he ran AI and data science practices at Cognizant and Capgemini Invent before bootstrapping DeLorean AI with his own savings. The company says its Medical AI was the first to be biologically validated by two independent laboratories, trained on tens of millions of patient records and backed by seven patents. He advises the United Nations and World Health Organization on AI.
Raul Popa
Raul Popa is the co-founder and CEO of TypingDNA, a behavioral biometrics company that recognizes people by the rhythm of how they type. A self-taught coder turned sociology-and-statistics graduate, he turned keystroke dynamics into a commercial authentication API used in banking, finance, and online education. He started the company alone in 2016 in Romania, brought it through Techstars and a Google-AI-backed Series A, and relocated it to New York just before the pandemic. Beyond enterprise security, he shipped TypingDNA Focus, a free app that predicts your mood from your typing.
Dr. Bunsen (Seth Brown)
Dr. Bunsen is the long-running weblog of Seth Brown, a data scientist who built a cult following among Mac power users by treating productivity as a science experiment. He writes precise, unhurried essays on Mac scripting, Markdown workflows, standing desks, and the art of telling stories with data. By day he studies complex systems and the structure of the internet; by night he ships small, sharp command-line tools and chronicles the obsessive pursuit of a frictionless workspace.
Katelyn Jetelina
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist, data scientist, and one of America's most influential science communicators. She founded Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) in March 2020 as a few sentences to update her UT Health students about COVID-19 - and somehow that turned into a 365,000-subscriber newsletter reaching people in 133 countries with over 500 million total views. Named a TIME100 Most Influential Person in Health, she translates complex public health science into actionable insights twice a week, covering everything from vaccines and bird flu to gun violence and federal health policy. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, consults with the CDC, and serves as an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health - all while raising two daughters and having visited 50+ countries.